


Death is Only a Door

by ronqueesha



Category: Mass Effect, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Reincarnation, Synthesis Ending, technically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-10
Updated: 2015-07-10
Packaged: 2018-04-08 14:28:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4308663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ronqueesha/pseuds/ronqueesha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by BardofHeartDive's <a href="4004029/">Virmire</a>, a look into a world where Kaidan died somewhere before the ending of the third game, and the choices before Shepard take on an entirely different meaning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death is Only a Door

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Without You: Virmire](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4004029) by [BardofHeartDive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BardofHeartDive/pseuds/BardofHeartDive). 



> This started as a comment left on the original work, and I couldn't stop thinking about it, so here it is. 
> 
> I am obsessed with certain storytelling concepts, particularly those of the cyclical nature of time, the indomitability of the human spirit and the nature of relationships and how they echo beyond the two people that start them. Because of that, Cloud Atlas is one of my favorite movies, and its main theme was one of the driving forces behind seeing this short work to completion. 
> 
> Basically, what I'm saying is, [listen to this link as you read.](https://youtu.be/i2UfHUZ-1mE)

One day, a lifetime ago, Ashley asked if Shepard believed the same as her. At the time, she said no, then quoted the Alliance charter’s stance on religious freedom. If she had been pressed, she would have said her life never gave her the opportunity to think someone beyond looked out for her, nor did she think eternal punishment awaited bad people. Dead was dead, end of story.

She lied.

_“Wake up.”_

The voice sounded far away, but it carried the power and noise of a million people speaking at the same time. It sounded ancient and terrible and it dug into her skull the same way the Illusive Man’s vile controlling thoughts did, just before she ended him.

It commanded her, but she refused to listen. Not because she felt particularly spiteful, or somehow able resist the siren call of indoctrination. She just…

_“You have to get up.”_

She physically could not comply.

Didn’t the voice understand? She had nothing left. Harbinger and its puppet did exactly what they set out to do. They kicked and kicked until the fight had been driven out of her. Every breath she took served to reinforce that thought. Each rib felt cracked and broken, pushing at unnatural angles in her chest and rubbing against each other as her torn lungs expanded and contracted. She could barely move her arms and legs, so covered in cuts and bruises that she could not see the natural color of her skin under the blood.

Her nose bled. Her limbs bled. Her stomach bled. Everything bled or broke or tore.

Nothing left.

She collapsed again.

 _I’m going to die now_. She told herself.

Well, if she was going to die here on the Citadel, she might as well take in the view. That technically didn’t count as waking up.

Shepard looked past her broken body to the world around her. In the distance, the stars shone and sparkled like they had since the beginning of time, and would continue to burn until the end of creation itself. But between those stars, madness reigned. Reapers tore through warships as if they were nothing, extinguishing thousands of lives with every heartbeat, every pained breath. Behind them, Earth burned as even more people were slaughtered every passing moment. Madness had overtaken the stars, and, like their sparkling light, it would not end until creation itself crashed around them. The Reapers would never stop.

The Reapers were also winning, even in the face of the Crucible docking intact. Straining her aching neck muscles, Shepard looked up to see long black marks of carbon against some of the huge machine’s plating. It, too, managed to be scarred by the war. All that planning, all those fights and battles and months of stress, thinking this machine gave them a chance… it had been futile.

She lied to Ashley back on the first Normandy. And right now, more than ever, she wished her own private beliefs were true. If this was truly the end of her life, and all life as she knew it, she prayed with all her heart that she could…

“Shepard, listen to me. Get up.” A second voice said. Not the screaming of a million minds at once, just one person. A gentle, kind and loving person.

Someone she saw die.

“No. Not you… not you.”

Her head ached again, just like it did a moment before.

“Please look at me.”

“I can’t.”

No. It couldn’t be. She refused to believe it.

“You can. You must, if you want this to end.”

Shepard looked up to see _him_. A ghost, a phantom, bathed in light as if everything she ever heard about the afterlife were true. Maybe Ash had been right all along. Was it too late to pick up an entire religion on the day you died?

Not bothering to keep appearances as everything ended around her, Shepard let out a wail and a sob as tears fell from her bruised and swollen eyes.

“Kaidan…”

Kaidan Alenko stood before her, whole and healthy.

She reached out her hand as far as it would go before a cut that went deep into her muscle caused her to hiss and pull it back. Before it collapsed down to cold metal, her aching digits passed through his leg. She felt nothing but air.

“You’re not real.” Her throat constricted as reality forced its way into her mind. This wasn’t life after death, this was something else.

“I'm just as real as you are.”

“But you’re not him.” Strength returned to her voice as anger made her heart pump. Torture resistance training had been a part of the Special Forces curriculum. She knew what this was. One last Reaper trick. A form of torture so insidious it almost broke her in the span of a single sobbing breath. Almost.

Kaidan died, she watched it happen. Her heart shattered that day and she never bothered to pick up the pieces again. Even when her friends and shipmates found times and occasions to uplift her mood, it had always been an act. She kept that hole in her spirit wide open and raw, a wound she never allowed to heal. It hurt every goddamn day, but she needed that pain to move on, to keep her inspired. And maybe, just maybe, she kept that pain alive so she would not feel guilty about finding a way to end this war in a body bag.

_“I am a construct, an intelligence, created long before you were born, to solve a problem.”_

Kaidan paused, then spoke again. No, he roared with a million voices.

_“I am the Catalyst.”_

The power of those words staggered her back, eroding the anger and the confidence that came with it. Kaidan had been powerful in his own way, sometimes terrifying, yes, but not like this. He tempered his ferocity with a gentility of spirit she lacked. That gentility, more than anything, drew her to him like a thirsty desert traveler, desperate for an oasis. He had been a guiding light, a rock, that inspired her to do better, to fight harder, to keep going even in the darkest of times.

How DARE the Reapers use his image like this!

Everything inside of her wanted to shoot the… thing that took his image. Had she not been a broken mess of injuries and shattered bones, she would have attacked it without thinking, without hesitation.

She couldn’t even move her hand anymore. Nor did she think she could look down and see if she still held a firearm.

The thing in Kaidan’s glowing skin spoke of its inception, its grand mission, and the new powers granted by the Crucible, but it just came out as noise to her. Even though it used his voice, she didn’t bother to listen. It spoke of organics and synthetics never coming to true understanding, and how that constant flaw in both forms of life always led to conflict, and the possible sterilization of the galaxy.

And yet, for all its bluster, the Kaidan-thing seemed to fall into its own trap. It failed to understand her simple organic state of being.

She did not care.

“Shepard, are you listening?” The projection of the man she loved knelt down before her and touched her cheek. And she felt warmth where she expected nothingness. Her head shot up.

“What?”

Though Kaidan’s face remained the same illusion of light and shadow, she saw something behind it. A subtle thing, a twitch, a nod, a faint clue that no machine could ever replicate. The hand on her cheek moved in the special way only he could move it. It reminded her of the few nights they spent together in bed, and he would just admire her.

It had to be him.

“Kaidan?”

He nodded.

But then the hand retracted and he stood. The warmth and comfort disappeared.

_“Synthesis. Add your energy to the Crucible’s. The chain reaction will combine all synthetic and organic life into a new framework. A new DNA. Your organic energy, the essence of who and what you are, will be broken down and dispersed. Organics will be perfected by integrating fully with technology. Synthetics, in turn, will finally have full understanding of organic life.”_

“Rewriting all life in the galaxy? That’s… monstrous. That’s…”

“The ideal solution, and you know it, Shepard.” Kaidan put his hands on his hips in the same way he used to when dressing down a subordinate. “It’ll end the war forever, not just postpone it for a few years or centuries.”

“I can’t.” A new tear fell down Shepard’s cheek. It joined with some of the blood on her face and splashed into a pink mist below her.

_“The organics were not ready before. It is not something that can be forced. You are ready, and you may choose it.”_

Memories flashed through Shepard’s mind. Painful, like everything else, pulled up by a force not of her own mind.

“My Cerberus implants. And the Geth.”

“You’ve always shown everyone around you how to see the world differently. Even when you were rebuilt, you were the same woman I met on the first Normandy. It didn’t change you, but you changed everyone else. Why not make it a permanent lesson?”

Kaidan reached his hand out for her. All she had to do was take it and accept his offer.

Would it be so bad if she did what it said? It arguments… _his arguments_ … seemed to make sense.

“If I change what it means to be alive.” She whispered as she looked into his face.

“You change the rules of everything.”

“I can change what it means to die.”

“You can rewrite the meaning of death itself.”

“I can…”

“You can.”

She took his hand. It felt so warm, so strong. She felt his calloused skin, even though her eyes saw herself touching only light. She pulled herself up, even though her legs wrenched and tore underneath her. His insistent, gentle pressure on her hand kept her steady.

“Come on, Shepard. One last run, just you and me. Like it was always meant to be.”

She did not take her eyes, or her hand, off of the illusion as she began to limp forward. Her vision blurred as tears flowed, but could not pass the swelling on her cheeks. A thin trail of blood followed her as the wound in her stomach continued to ooze.

One step.

Two steps.

The light from the Crucible became blinding as she approached. It burned.

Three steps.

“Don’t worry, I’m right here with you.”

She kept walking. As long as she felt his hand, she could go anywhere.

Holding the hand of a dead man. She wished Ashley could see her now.

Here, at the end of the world, she would tell the other Spectre how she really felt. It had been something she read once, long ago, just before enlisting in the Navy. It had been those words that kept her alive through the worst of the N7 training, then the horrors of the years that followed.

Deep down, past all the bluster and pain, they were what kept her going after she lost him.

**“We do not stay dead for long. I believe death is only a door. When it closes, another opens.”**

The truth was that she did believe in heaven. But she didn’t think it was full of puffy clouds, angels with harps and dead people in white robes. Her idea of heaven was just him, waiting for her, ready to start over in another place, another time.

She kept walking until she felt that she could move no more. The power from the great machine above her thrummed like a god out of some kind of ancient mythology. The power to reshape the entire galaxy churned before her. She felt insignificant before it.

“Come on, Shepard, just one more step.”

She locked eyes with him as she mustered the will. If he said she could, she could.

“Kaidan, if I do this… if I open the door.”

“I’ll see you on the other side.”

She let go of his hand.

She fell.

 

*****

 

“Dammit, the squash aren’t growing.” Tama said to no one as she brushed some of the fertilizer off the large green leaves. The faint traces of their circuitry flitted against her touch, assessing her neural pathways and determining that, no, her hand was not food. After a brief moment of calculation, the leaves turned back to the twin suns overhead, drinking in as much light as they could to sustain their failing energy reserves.

Tama could have had a shipment of nanogenes sent from Virmire or Thessia, and guaranteed they grew to optimum size and nutritional benefit, but she’d never make that call. As chief agricultural officer of Shuran Colony, she had to show everyone that non-native crops could grow in this new planet’s soil. Even if it killed her, she’d find the optimal growing season, mixture of fertilizer and the right crops to keep everyone sustainably fed.

The colony consisted of only a single settlement for now, with a few prefabricated buildings and one brick house, built for the expedition leader as a sign that everyone here wanted this to be their permanent home. Tama remembered her circuits overheating and her muscles aching for days after laying out dozens of bricks made from Shuran’s own mud, but the end result had been worth it. A perfect hybrid of human design and Turian functionality, the house would probably stand for generations as long as the colony remained strong.

A shadow fell over Tama as she stood up and brushed some of the fertilized soil off her knees. The servos in her back complained, but they always did whenever she did serious work around low-growing plants. A minor flaw in her genetic code, nothing to be worried about. She glanced up, not enough to be blinded by the twin suns, but enough to watch the transport that flew overhead make a graceful and quiet touchdown on the giant circle of concrete they liked to call a spaceport.

She adjusted her optic lenses as she watched the spectacle of the landing, just enough to zoom in on the transport’s name and some of its windows.

Ah, the _New Serrice_ , one of the ships bound from Earth, carrying some much needed irrigation piping and a few dozen new colonists. Her eyes also gave her a brief warning about some radiation escaping from the port engine. If she could spot it from this far away, she felt confident the techs saw it too. They’d get it fixed up before the transport lifted off and hit the nearest relay.

“I love meeting new colonists.” The bubbly voice of Madame La’neris, an Asari matriarch, said as she walked down the dusty path next to Tama’s farm. The matriarch had been a surprising addition to the growing colony a few years ago, but not an unwelcome one. She knew better than to overstep her political bounds and try to take control of the settlement, but at the same time, she provided a constant stream of sage advice to anyone who would listen. Most people saw her as the actual power behind Shuran colony, even if all the documents and statues put a Turian square in charge.

As the Asari bounced up and down with excitement, the green of her circuitry flared along with her. It accented well with the dark violet of her skin, which sometimes made Tama jealous. Her own tan human skin, with all its flaws and tiny hairs, made her glowing parts stick out like an ugly accessory.

“That makes one of us.” Tama replied as she pulled the thick gardening gloves off her hands.

“Oh, you won’t be able to spoil my mood today, Tama. Not when we get new people _and_ celebrate Shepard day at the same time.”

“Shepard day?”

“Don’t tell me you haven’t been checking your internal chronometer. Not even a few plants can keep you _that_ busy.”

“You’d be surprised.”

La’neris huffed as Tama secretly looked into her own memory files to check her chronometer. And sure enough, marked clear as sunrise, this specific 20-hour period of Citadel time had indeed been set as “Shepard day”. She heard a few things about it in school, but the only notable fact she could recall was that nobody celebrated it anymore. The last official state function on the Citadel had drawn less than a dozen people, and that was centuries ago. Whoever or whatever “Shepard day” celebrated had been forgotten long ago.

Except by, maybe, an eccentric thousand-year-old Asari.

“So, Shepard day?”

“Yes, Shepard day. Are your audio processors working?” La’neris always barbed people like that, the privilege of being elderly.

“I just didn’t think anyone would get excited over a minor note in the calendar.”

“Ah, the ignorance of youth. Maybe you need to upload your personality to Central for a few days and pick up some archive files. I swear, young aliens never want to learn anymore.”

“Or, you could stop complaining and just tell me why you’re so excited.”

The matriarch gasped and turned to her. Even at such an advanced age, she looked just as elegant and beautiful as Asari born a century ago. Even her green circuits worked to compliment her features, not distract from them. “The rudeness of youth, too.”

As expected, La’neris didn’t bother to explain anything, she just walked off, huffing like she always did when upset. Tama stuck her tongue out at the ancient woman. It didn’t do anything or send any rude signals to the Asari’s sub-processors, but it felt good.

Tama went back to studying the magnified image of the _New Serrice_ as it ended its post-flight checklist and began unloading passengers. A lot of the usual suspects filed out. People from core planets who had no idea how to live on a colony, shady-looking characters whose eyes shifted back and forth and broadcast subtle but constant white noise to keep people from scanning them, and of course, a few military types to “provide security”.

Colonial security. What a joke. All they needed to do was send a signal to the nearest Ancient Machine and it would come at full FTL burn to take care of anything that threatened them. If Tama remembered correctly, the AM known as Naloxos patrolled their sector. One of the big ones, just under two kilometers long. He had a loud voice, but thankfully not much to say. He liked to keep to himself as he flew between planets, only helping when needed.

When the last thug stepped off the transport, Tama turned away and reset her eyes back to normal magnification. She’d seen worse groups arrive, but none of the newbies looked to be worth her time. All they represented were more mouths to feed and less time for her to set up a working food production system. She put her gloves back on and went back to work spreading the fertilizer around.

 _You could have chosen any colony in the galaxy, but you wanted the challenge of something brand new_. She reminded herself.

If she picked the dying plants now, she could see if La’neris knew a recipe that called for half-grown vegetables. Maybe something arty and fun, served on expensive planets for people who paid more for a single meal than she earned in a year. At least then she could call crop a partial success. Hell, maybe she could start a fad and get some exports going.

“They’re too close together.” A gentle voice came from the road.

“Excuse me?” Tama said, bothering only to turn her head, not stand up.

“The squash. You planted them too close together. They grow best with over a meter of space between them.”

“Who the hell are you to tell me how to grow my own food?”

_“My family owns an orchard back home.”_

She heard the voice, but did not know where it came from. It seemed to echo from everywhere, but also nowhere, as if she hallucinated it. And yet, she _knew_ it really happened, and she _knew_ it came from him.

Tama stood up fast enough to make her servos whine and spark. “What did you say?”

“I said I’m here to deliver the irrigation equipment.”

The delivery boy looked mousy, barely able to withstand Shuran’s strong sunlight. Well, boy probably sounded unfair. He just looked… soft. Young. Totally unfit for a life away from easy recharge stations and circulated air. He wouldn’t survive more than a month here.

“Oh, of course.”

She removed her gloves again and placed her hand on the image-paper held in front of her. Their fingertips brushed just before her palm registered her EM signature. She looked right at him as she held her hand a bit longer than she needed to. She didn’t share other people’s excitement of meeting new colonists, but she did like pranking them now and again. His face grew redder and redder, which made his circuit glow hot as she kept her hand still on top of his.

She grinned. _He’ll be a fun one to break._

“I-I, uh, I’ll get to work getting the stuff unloaded.” He muttered as she folded the paper and put it in his pocket.

“You do that.”

She watched him leave, and also watched his circuits flush as his heartbeat grew more rapid and powerful.

“Happy Shepard day.” She called out to him.

**Author's Note:**

> “Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood as we understand the Theory of Relativity and Principles of Uncertainty: phenomenon that determine the course of our lives. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday I believed that I would never have done what I did today. These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. At each point of intersection, each encounter suggests a new potential direction.” Isaac Sachs. ‘Cloud Atlas’


End file.
